PowerPoint vs. Prezi

For our most recent assignment, we were asked to create a presentation in both PowerPoint and Prezi, and compare our experiences with the two.

I’ve used PowerPoint for over ten years, but it’s often been for presentations where I am the speaker and the slides serve as my key points. I’m sure we’ve all seen the presenters that user PowerPoint for all their notes and basically just read off the slide; the result is too much text and we all have a hard time following along. Presentations like these give PowerPoint a bad reputation, since I think it can be a very valuable tool, especially when the presenter uses text, images, and animations effectively. PowerPoint can be complex at times, too, but I think they’ve done a good job in later versions about letting people create quality and professional looking presentations without too much hassle.

I do not have as much experience using PowerPoint as a standalone presentation tool. I enjoyed this aspect, too, especially learning how to include the next, previous, and back to first slide buttons.

Prior to the assignment, I had never heard of Prezi, so I was intrigued to go about exploring it. While I can see the appeal of Prezi for some people, I found the concept as a whole extremely frustrating, especially as a long-time user of Powerpoint. I found the process of inserting text and images to be quite a hassle, and it was not always easy for me to resize or control the objects as I would like. Finding pictures was incredibly difficult and I think it’s much easier to find images using Microsoft’s built-in image finder. I was also disappointed with the lack of features compared to PowerPoint, such as action buttons or animation.

I will say that I thought Prezi was a very interesting concept. I liked the idea of how everything is one big whiteboard and you can zoom in/out and move around as you’d like. I can definitely see the appeal of Prezi for someone who does not like PowerPoint or is intimidated by it. I would not, however, recommend Prezi to someone like me who is comfortable using a good chunk of PowerPoint features, already.

After this assignment, I still think PowerPoint is the best for “speaker assisted” presentations. You can do so much more with it, and it’s much better for someone who wants complete control over their presentation. Even if I was asked to create a standalone presentation with no speaker, I would still use PowerPoint. I may, however, consider investigating other online presentation tools to see if they serve me any better.